


The Boy You Left Behind

by Sintari (OriginalSintari)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 06:17:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14688216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OriginalSintari/pseuds/Sintari
Summary: You never get hurt by what you don't say. Steve always thought they would have time.  Post-Infinity War.





	The Boy You Left Behind

“Oh God.”

_The trouble is, you think you’ll have time._

Maybe if anybody could be forgiven for this misconception it’s Steve Rogers, a man just a shade shy of 100 who, until just moments ago, could count among his many blessings the fact that his best friend Bucky Barnes had somehow escaped the relentless press of time, too.

()()()()()

The first time Bucky – no, Sergeant Barnes – left him behind, his uniformed silhouette solid and familiar against the neon wonders of the Stark Expo, Steve had almost called after him the words that had caught in his heart and swelled in his throat all those years they were boys together. 

Instead he’d just said, “Don’t win the war ‘til I get there.” 

You never get hurt by what you don’t say.

“The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a new big band arrangement of that dusty old melody, had taunted Steve from radio after radio all that summer.

()()()()()

How was he to know that the next time he would be the one to leave Bucky behind? 

_The thing they don’t tell you about war is that it can be beautiful. Like a tracer’s graceful arc illuminating the face of your brother in arms in it’s orange light. How that night, after he’s saved your life with his lethal aim, your fingers will itch to touch the stubble on his jaw._

_Beautiful as a storm fomenting over the remotest Alps. How when he lands behind you on the train, his eyes would be wild and his nostrils flared and you’d think to yourself has God and the Universe ever wrought a sight more beautiful?_

_Even the uncanny blue flare of Hydra weapon fire holds an eye-pleasing quality at first. Until it becomes a color you’ll go out of your way to avoid for time immemorial._

_Then he falls, and you’re left standing alone, dismantled. And from that point forward you live your life like a space traveler whose fingers only itch to trace familiar constellations from the surface of an alien planet._

_Then you carry on with the mission. Crash the plane. Unaware of what you leave behind._

()()()()()

We pay and we pay for our sins, Steve thinks, before a right cross delivers the next bag of sand to the far wall.

()()()()()

_Then he’s there. This Winter Soldier, this unyielding automaton with your oldest friend’s voice and his face and his eyes._

_He delivers you from the water, and as you, half-drowned, focus in on his retreating back it’s 1944 and you’re the boy he left behind all over again._

()()()()()

Two years Steve searches for Bucky.

And then Ross brandishes his hateful Accords and musters up the brass to claim that they, his Avengers, are “unconcerned about what they leave behind.” 

Steve wonders then how much in their lives would have been different, his and Bucky's, without the whims of powerful men handing down orders on mimeographed and bound paper, expecting them to blindly follow.

()()()()()

“I remember all of them,” Bucky had said to Tony. And it was Bucky, this time. But his eyes fell into that thousand-yard stare just a little too often in those days after Steve left his shield behind in Siberia and took Bucky instead.

A trade he’d make again.

They found quiet time alone on the quinjet to Wakanda, pressing thigh to thigh and calf to calf when there was plenty of space, but somehow every time Steve found the nerve to speak about anything more than the lightest memories or the flight plan, he’d catch the eerie stillness of the Winter Soldier out of the corner of his eye, and now was not the time. 

()()()()()

He wandered aimlessly around Shuri’s lab until he became his worst nightmare: not of use.

“You can go,” Shuri had said. 

“It will take time,” she’d said.

Somehow the one thing they’d always had an abundance of, Steve had thought then. His mistake was that he’d actually had the all-fired gall to believe that happiness might come to stay for people like them. That one day before too very long the man who had no problem declaring himself an outlaw for those truths he believed were right, would find the moment to express the truest thing he’d known since he was twelve-years-old. 

And so, he’d left Bucky behind again.

()()()()()

Then yet another unfathomable evil bore down on them.

Back in Wakanda after far too long, he’d embraced his oldest friend again, and there had been no trace of the Winter Soldier in the brief squeeze Bucky gave the back of his neck. They’d clung together slightly longer than seemly then Steve had backed away to get a good look. Bucky appeared healthier now, in this hidden country, in this world of aliens and gods, than he’d looked back in Brooklyn when illness stalked the tenements with the creeping lethality of mustard gas, or during the War when alongside the Howling Commandos they had subsisted on Army rations, and not enough sleep, and were happy. 

“I’ve loved you for nearly 100 years,” Steve could’ve said.

But first, the fight.

()()()()()

“Oh God.”

Steve kneels and rakes his fingers through the fine brown ash where his love last stood. Clenches his fist only to watch the ashes escape his grasp anyway.

_When you’ve watched the love of your life fall away from you, then you’ve watched it again, how do you ever see anything else?_

We pay and we pay.

**Author's Note:**

> This first foray into the MCU fandom was inspired by and written for the incomparable [Myrafur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrafur/pseuds/myrafur). And, mystifyingly, by the lonely trumpets in [Nantes](https://open.spotify.com/track/4JvclO8lNugobD1afavcYS?si=imQcs0-NQhay_27p2vipYg) by Beirut.


End file.
